MAGA Is Not Hypocritical

Why the Hypocrisy Dunk Serves Fascism

Apparently, some of you need to read George Orwell’s 1984 again. Or, at the very least, you need to revisit the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command,” in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard confronts the Cardassian torturer, Gul Madred. The torture session is only incidentally about extracting information. Its primary topic is the count of the lights shining behind Madred’s desk. He demands that Picard agree that there are five lights—but there are only four. Madred insists that once he agrees, Picard will be released into a more pleasant detention. His goal is the total surrender of his victim’s perception to the authority of the state.

Many of you are currently failing the same collective test of our resistance to MAGA fascism, and that failure begins with the way we respond to fascist lies. Usually we post some meme that broadly asserts: before, they said this—and now they are saying that. As if mere inconsistency could reverse the reality of the fascist takeover.

But here is the diagnosis, delivered without restraint: every single instance of calling out fascist hypocrisy is surrender. I am going to repeat myself because the point continues to vanish into the noise of our political discourse: every single instance of calling out fascist hypocrisy is surrender. This requires understanding a specific nuance, including the oft-repeated quote from Orwell:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Fascism is a transitional pathway to totalitarianism. It is the process through which people undergo conditioning to reject their own perception in favor of submission to authority. Authority, in this context, involves controlling the nature of existence. It is the active rejection of reality. Someone who can be taught to reject reality in favor of power is more than a subject. They have become a collaborator.

When you appeal to hypocrisy, you’re denouncing only the symptom, while the root cause—the misallocation of power—thrives. Trump’s tens of thousands of documented lies are not attempts to deceive in the traditional sense. His incoherent pronouncements represent a form of A/B testing: which “reality” generates the largest reaction? Which gets the most press? Which prevarications lead to the most consternation in the minds of opponents?

Hypocrisy dunks reify this strategy. They provide the feedback that keeps the fascist machine grinding inexorably toward totalitarianism. They acknowledge that the anti-fascist coalition remains confused and in disarray. They are an expression of naivete about the mechanics of power. So instead of thinking or saying, “Before you did this, and now you are doing that,” we must recognize each time that there is never any consistent strategy except raw power.

Power includes never having to answer to a higher authority. Power includes remaining forever unbound by former positions. Power includes the ability to declare the sky red one day and green the next, regardless of its actual hue. Fascists are lawless, and immune to empirical reality—the only rule is that there are no rules. Every time you bring a rulebook, or reality, to a knife fight, you not only lose, you demonstrate the uselessness of the rules, and the irrelevance of reality itself.

So MAGA is not hypocritical—it is shockingly consistent. Hypocrisy dunks do real damage by obscuring the internal logic of how fascism operates. To see the machinery, you must first look at the principles of autocratic transition: If you seek total power, you cannot move from democracy to totalitarianism overnight, because the system will resist you. Laws, courts, elections, journalism, and checks and balances all stand in the way of any budding dictator. Therefore, any aspiring dictator must attack every pillar of democracy at once. Speed and confusion are the greatest assets of fascism, creating a sense of inevitability that wears down the will of the opposition.

That moment arrived last year when Mehdi Hasan publicly engaged a panel of far-right figures who openly identified with the fascist tradition and cited Carl Schmitt as their guiding theorist. Schmitt, the jurist of Nazi Germany, defined politics through the friend–enemy distinction, treating sovereignty as the power to decide who belongs, who does not, and when law submits to authority. When MAGA intellectuals invoke Schmitt, they are stating their commitment to a political order organized around loyalty, exclusion, and the primacy of power over law.

That friend–enemy distinction reappears at the institutional level as what legal scholars call the dual state. The rule of law functions only when the law applies equally to everyone, so fascism advances by splitting the population into two categories: those who belong and those who do not. One group retains the protections of a normative legal order, while the other is governed through unlimited prerogative power. In this system, law operates as a sorting mechanism rather than a constraint, and enforcement tracks loyalty rather than conduct.

The first stage of the American fascist takeover involved the separation of the population between those who belong—the “Real White Americans” or “Heritage Citizens”—and those who don’t, including immigrants, outsiders, or people often described as coming from "shithole countries."

Those who belong will continue to be protected by the rule of law while not being bound by it, and those who don't belong will continue to be bound by the law while not being protected by it. This destruction of the legal order occurs through the appointment of loyalists to the courts and the installation of agency heads who swear loyalty to the autocrat above the law. At that point, regime members enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution, while regime opponents suffer political prosecutions regardless of their innocence.

The script is predictable and consistent: fact-based journalism is “fake news.” Elections lost by the autocrat are “rigged.” Partisans who fail to vote in lockstep with the dictator are labeled “partisans in name only” and face immediate removal from the coalition. Judges, legislators, regulators, and members of the civil service who refuse to comply are drummed out of their jobs.

Fascist regimes always build camps and hire thugs. They always use escalating violence and make conditions of detention deliberately miserable to inspire fear. They begin their crackdown by targeting the obvious outsiders: non-citizens and ethnic minorities. Then they broaden their targets to include LGBTQ+ people, women, academics, and scientists. Later, regime opponents—including politicians and male members of the dominant majority—are added to the list of those who do not belong. Formerly “protected” categories like “white” or “male,” along with any vestigial political or institutional authority, no longer indemnify the troublesome.

Once rule is consolidated to a large degree, the regime can start murdering people with impunity. By that point, it's usually too late to stop the slide into autocracy—because if you try, you’ll get murdered.

To see this consistency in action, we must review the common hypocrisy dunk regarding the cases of Ashli Babbitt and Renee Good. Both were white women. Both were shot by federal authorities during conditions of unrest. To a person operating under a democratic rulebook, these cases should be handled with a single legal and ethical standard: Babbitt was attacking the government with force, Good was not. Babbitt was therefore culpable and Good was not. However, MAGA reacted with a precision that reveals the underlying fascist logic.

They treated Ashli Babbitt like a martyr, claiming she was gunned down on January 6, 2021 by a “tyrannical” government. Trump’s regime paid out a sizeable civil settlement to her family. Trump also pardoned 1,600 people who were convicted of charges related to that insurrection.

By contrast, they treated Renee Good as an enemy combatant, a “domestic terrorist,” member of the “woke mob,” and a danger to the state. Even though she was none of those. They treated her ICE-agent murderer like a hero. The Vice President immediately claimed it was a good shooting and that the shooter had “absolute immunity” against any charges of wrongdoing.

Do you see it? Do you understand why under fascism this is not hypocrisy?

Ashli Babbitt belonged. She was a patriot because she was loyal to the regime. She gave her life to support the autocrat. To MAGA, her status as a loyalist granted her the right to be protected by the law while her actions remained unbound by it. Renee Good did not belong. She peacefully opposed the regime. She was also a lesbian, which represents another category of non-belonging under the fascist framework. Therefore, the “law” was used to bind her—to the point of death—while she was granted none of its protections.

Calling this hypocrisy conceals how fascism works. It suggests that there is a shared standard that the fascists are simply failing to meet. It suggests they should be embarrassed by the contradiction. They are not. The contradiction is the evidence of their power. When they say “back the blue” during one protest but attack the police during another, they are telling you that the police are a tool for use against those who do not belong. Not as impartial enforcers of the law. So when the police stand in the way of those who do belong, the police become the enemy.

So there is no “back the blue” principle. There is only the belonging principle.

Under fascism or totalitarianism, rights are contingent on demonstrating absolute loyalty to the autocrat. Any deviation in word or deed can immediately move anyone from the category of “belongs” to the category of “does not belong.” Once you are in that second category, everything up to and including your murder is justified by the regime.

This is perfectly consistent and not hypocritical in any respect.

When you point out that they have flipped their position, you are appealing to a higher authority—truth, logic, or the law—that the regime has already rejected. You are talking to a brick wall and wondering why the wall does not apologize for being in your way. The goal of the fascist is to make you live in a world where the truth is whatever the leader says it is today. If you cry hypocrisy, you are signaling that you still believe the rulebook matters.

The rulebook is gone. It was destroyed the moment the population was split into those protected by the law and those merely bound by it. It was discarded the moment “reality” became a matter of testing for the largest reaction.

Stop focusing on trying to enforce consistency, and understand that your confusion is the goal. Every time you react with “how can they say this after saying that?” you are confirming that their strategy of sowing disarray is working. Recognize each move for what it is: raw force. Power includes the ability to categorize humans into patriots or terrorists based solely on their loyalty to one man.

The only way to fight this is to stop participating in the lie that they are confused or hypocritical. They know exactly what they are doing. They are building a world where truth is subordinated to loyalty. You must understand the sorting. You must understand the categories of belonging. You must understand that the goal is autocracy, and the method is the total destruction of the law—and your ability to trust your own mind—and even your eyes and ears.

To borrow a phrase from Mike Brock: The sky is blue. There are 24 hours in a day. Climate change is real and human-caused. Two plus two equals four.

And, borrowing from Jean-Luc Picard:

“There are four lights.”

No matter what the regime says, no matter how many settlements they pay to the “right” people or how much immunity they give to the murderers of the “wrong” people, there are still only four lights. Stop dunking. Start recognizing the fight for what it is. Reassert the reality they are trying to erase. Leave the rulebook at home and identify the categories of belonging for what they are: a roadmap for the destruction of democracy, rule of law, and autonomy itself.

Stop the surrender.

---